Inside

By Susan Marie Conrad

2017 Washington State Book Award finalist, based on the strength of its literary merit and lasting importance!
 

The Ocean is calling me. This is my Journey.
 

With these words, in the spring of 2010, Susan Marie Conrad scaled her world down to an 18-foot sea kayak and launched a solo journey that took her north to Alaska. With no sense of where she belonged in space and unreconciled feelings of a painful childhood following her, she decided that instead of running away, she would run toward her dreams. Her adventure took her along the western coast of North America, through the Inside Passage—a 1,200-mile ribbon of water—in a journey of the sea and soul.
 

The expedition took her deep within herself, humbling her, healing her, helping her to discover the depths of her own strength and courage. On her way from Anacortes, Washington, to Juneau, Alaska, she grappled with fear and exhaustion, forged friendships with quirky people in the strangest places, endured perilous weather and angry seas, and pretended not to be intimidated by 700-pound grizzly bears and 40-ton whales.
 

She lived her dream.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Driftwood Publishing
• Release date: Mar 11, 2024
• ISBN: 9781736590676

Susan Marie Conrad

Susan Marie Conrad grew up on a small farm in upstate New York. By dint of exploring the mountains of Colorado, Oregon, and Montana, she eventually discovered the dynamic and addictive environment of coastal British Columbia and Washington State, where she thrives as an adventure-seeker. Susan is a writer, photographer, personal trainer, kayak instructor, and outdoor enthusiast. She lives with her second-half-of-life partner, along with a ridiculously large dog and two normal-sized cats in Oso, Washington. Learn more at SusanMarieConrad.com

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Preface

Believe that you can do anything you set your mind to. Your passion should be your path and your path should be your passion.

—Rosita Arvigo

IT HAS BEEN SAID that a person doesn’t take a trip, but rather a trip takes a person. The Inside Passage took me—in a kayak—from Anacortes, Washington, to Juneau, Alaska. The Inside Passage pulled me forward, into the now, as my past ebbed away and my future flooded in. In turn idyllic and epic, it took me through glacially carved landscapes and impenetrable forests, narrow channels and wide ocean passages, spellbinding seas and mixmaster waves. And it took me deep within myself, humbling me, reminding me that I had much to learn. I have still only begun to understand its impact.

In Spring 2010, with my world scaled down to an 18-foot sea kayak and a 1,200-mile ribbon of water known as the Inside Passage, I launched a journey of the sea and the soul that took me both north to Alaska and inward to the discovery of the depths of my own strength and courage. My journey took 66 days, during which time I lived in a wetsuit, paddled marathon distances for weeks on end, forged friendships with quirky people in the strangest of places, and pretended not to be intimidated by seven-hundred-pound grizzly bears and forty-ton whales. I lived my dream.

That dream entailed paddling through wild, steep country, subject to strong currents and wind, and extreme tidal differences. The realities of hypothermia, dwindling food supplies, nonexistent beaches, and alarmingly high walls of water rising over twenty feet were part and parcel of the journey. At times I floated in a magical world among whales and icebergs and immeasurable beauty; other times I paddled wildly with fear at my back.

I didn’t set out to research, discover, or prove anything, although the logistical planning often took on Olympian proportions. And, of course, the concept of paddling to Alaska was astronomical in itself. I’d never been to Alaska, let alone kayaked to it. Although I was an experienced kayaker and had some knowledge of the Inside Passage, I expected lessons would be presented along the way and prepared myself for mental, emotional, and physical extremes.

The IP, as those familiar with the waters of the Inside Passage refer to it, meanders along the western edge of North America. Touted as one of the most scenic and challenging paddling trips on the continent, its Holy Grailness seduced me. I’d first heard of the IP in 1992, when I met Jim Chester, a world-renowned adventurer whose own IP trip had blazed a trail for mine. He’d recently returned from his solo voyage, yet I thought nothing more of it, and certainly never intended to paddle the thing on my own. But life, I found, throws curveballs, and perspectives change.

In 2009, I watched my father, a once strong and comical man, deteriorate into a catatonic slump from advanced Alzheimer’s, finally dying in an upstate New York nursing home. Other unfortunate life events avalanched around me, heavy doors slammed in my face, and I lost my sense of where I belonged in space. I longed for a drama-free chunk of time where things would not repeatedly blow up around me. Then a book about a woman who kayaked the Inside Passage crossed my path. While devouring the pages, I wondered if my own life wasn’t on the cusp of something new and exciting, if certain opportunities had closed their doors so that life could simply make room for new doors to open. I finished the book, and in the privacy of my own company, defiantly proclaimed, I’m paddling to Alaska! Once I flung that door open, I began a new chapter—one that was dog-eared, highlighted, bookmarked, tattered and torn. After all, adventures are not tidy little things.

OVER TIME, JIM CHESTER’S own journey up the Inside Passage would prop open a few more doors—understated portals that stood patiently waiting for me to walk through them. Jim’s desire to share his solo experience led him to hammer out his entire handwritten journal on a Smith-Corona typewriter. These words graced the top of the first page:

They can’t understand. Can’t comprehend. Can’t relate. I existed on a different plane for a summer. Not necessarily better, nor worse, just different. My experience was personal. My very own. No one else’s. It cannot be adequately related to another. Case in point—it cannot even be successfully transferred from my mind to this paper.

When I first knew Jim, before I had experienced the Inside Passage myself, I thought that I understood. But it would take eighteen years for me to begin to comprehend what a journey of this nature meant and what could manifest along the way. As I began to chronicle my own experiences on the Inside, I slowly began to relate to all that his trip encompassed and how his complex involvement with mine would change my perspective—not only on this adventure we circuitously shared, but on all of life.

This is a journey through the physical, emotional, and spiritual landscapes of the Inside Passage, told largely through my own lens of experience, but also, in part, through Jim’s. We supported each other through this cumulative adventure as it morphed into a story of two adventures. To fully engage in our stories, it’s important that the reader knows who this man was, and understands how he influenced me and what he meant to me and my journey.

Jim was a tall man, with large, square shoulders, and a deep, learned voice. Handsome in a disheveled manner, his chestnut-brown hair dangled halfway down his back, restrained in a scraggly ponytail. A thick salt-and-cinnamon beard kept company with a bushy mustache. His skin, weathered from elements and age, stretched taut over a prominent Adam’s apple. On his beak-like nose sat a pair of perpetually smudged glasses, and behind those lurked penetrating steely blue eyes that could pierce your soul.

A long-time member of the Explorers Club, Jim had the honor, on two occasions, of carrying the Explorers Club flag, once in 2007 and once in 2009. The flags were placed at the depths of the world’s uncharted, deepest caves. Jim had dined on chocolate-covered tarantulas and alligator sushi, petted exotic reptiles, and rubbed shoulders with New York’s finest glitterati in the heady atmosphere of the Waldorf Astoria where he stood groomed and polished, or at least as much as a country boy caver from Montana could be, waiting his turn at the podium—right behind fellow honoree Buzz Aldrin. The 106th Explorers Club Annual Dinner was a gala event where Jim would be presented with the Citation of Merit award, in recognition of his outstanding services to the Club, a professional society dedicated to scientific exploration of Earth, its oceans, and outer space.

In the eighteen years I knew Jim, I witnessed a marked adventurous streak coursing through his body. A voracious reader, he still had his childhood copy of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, read over and over, until, in Jim’s words, its spine dropped off and the book’s pages threatened to scatter like a flock of surprised birds. In the 43 years after Jim first opened that tome, he sea kayaked over two-thousand miles, dived thermal features in Yellowstone Lake, rappelled into a 240-foot well in a European medieval castle, and logged over 2,000 hours underground: long, sodden, and often miraculous hours that involved 475 descents and 210 caves. He loved to climb mountains, too. He dabbled in whitewater kayaking as a diversion from far-reaching hauls in his longer, lissome boat; and skied dry Montana powder when the water turned a bit hard during the winter months.

Undoubtedly, Tom Sawyer and his cronies were only one of many catalysts that hurled Jim into a life of exploration, risk and adventure—a life that he often shared with me. Together, we mucked about in caves, huffed up mountaintops, and careened down nerve-wracking rivers; but it was the sea kayaking, particularly paddling over longish periods of time, that enraptured me the most. It was like backpacking on the water, I thought, without the heavy weight on your shoulders and the blisters on your feet.

Without Jim, the Inside Passage would have just been something out there that I would not have experienced at the privileged level I did in 2010. His own Inside Passage journey was one of several catalysts for me to embark on my own adventure. From the conception of my plan to the very last paddle stroke, he became an integral player and wholeheartedly supported my desire to paddle the IP. I trusted Jim implicitly. He helped me find my true north—and my way back—and for that I am forever grateful. It’s my hope that throughout these pages, you will hear Jim’s voice and you will come to understand just how immensely he helped me with this journey, and through that you will also come to see, as I ultimately did, what a huge impact he had on my life.

TO WRITE THIS BOOK, I relied on my own memories—both written down and locked away in my mind—as well as on Jim’s journal. The myriad of email posts he wrote while I was underway, the responses to those emails, and the thousands of photos I took also greatly assisted in this memoir.

This is not intended to be a guidebook, nor is it a how-to book. The Inside Passage is an enormous place, and this book only scratches its surface. The route I chose, and the manner in which I executed it, represent a single option and only one experience: mine. Craving challenge, stability and enlivened potential, I chose this complex coastline to reawaken my sense of adventure, to find answers to questions I had not yet asked—and to live wildly. To abandon myself to the possibility of it all and to be open to all that it could teach me, to feel free and run with the wind, the waves, the sea itself.

Adventure yanks at all our shirtsleeves. It is my hope that the pages of this book will kindle your sense of adventure—whether you set foot in a kayak or not—and that by sharing the magic of this beautiful coastline, it will impart a stronger connection to the natural environment and inspire you not only to explore it, but to cherish and protect it. May that insatiable curiosity to know what’s around the next corner be your moxie, as it was ultimately mine.

One

Why, When,

and What If?

Too many of us are not living our dreams because we are living our fears.

—Les Brown

One Pea in a Fog

I T’S NOT AN ADVENTURE until things start going wrong, Yvon Chouinard once said . Okay, Yvon, I get it, but REALLY? Does it nearly have to kill me? I was nearing the end of Grenville Channel, a 45-mile trough of water contained within steep walls rising more than two-thousand feet, its north end roughly 35 miles south of Prince Rupert, British Columbia. Pretty much in the middle of nowhere.

Places to land were scarce and my hopes to stop and camp were dashed on two occasions that day when grizzly bears—cubs in tow—stood defiantly along the shoreline. By the time I did find a marginal place to set up camp, I was a soggy, string-of-bad-luck, hypothermic bundle of exasperation. Had my adventure truly just begun? I didn’t know, but what I did know was that any residual arrogance I may have had was now whupped out of me. I was paddling solo on the Inside Passage, and I was being handed a pivotal lesson—almost along with my ass.

Give me a fucking break! I screamed at the top of my lungs—at the wind, at the stinging rain, at everything and at nothing, thrusting my chest forward, my arms hyper-extended behind me, all ten fingers spread wide in outrage. I was 38 days into my expedition and had come to accept, even expect, being cold and wet. But this was different—and much more dire.

My primal screams filled the forest, only to be reabsorbed by the howling wind, sullen seas, and the sucking mud of this godforsaken bay I was stuck in. I was attempting to set up camp a hair’s-width above the briny dung of what appeared to be a saltwater chicken coop, a goopy, flat area where the funky smell of seabird guano met my nostrils. Debris from last night’s high tide hung like Christmas garlands from the fringes of the impenetrable forest behind me. My campsite would certainly be under water in the middle of that night and the reality of having to deal with that made me sick to my stomach. Remembering that my sleeping bag was damp and my tent waterlogged, frantically crammed in the back hatch earlier that morning, made my heart sink even further.

A vigorous rain pelted the right side of my face, which was swollen and disfigured from the previous day’s blood-sucking black fly attack. Moments before, I’d shivered violently in sopping wet clothes, and struggled with a nylon tarp as the wind belligerently whipped it out of my hands. My fingers, barely able to tie the knots to secure the corners, became less and less dexterous. Gale force winds had descended upon Grenville Channel and were only slightly diffused by the landmass I was hiding behind.

Earlier that day, I’d briefly fallen asleep in my drifting kayak, then succumbed to the initial stages of hypothermia, as crushing fatigue took hold; I hadn’t cared enough to extract myself from the gallons of cold water I was sitting in inside my cockpit. Warm urine pooled in the crotch of my wetsuit, momentarily warming me as I peed in the boat. I’d landed here out of default, and ludicrously bad luck, after paddling nearly forty arduous miles, forced to move on at the twenty- and then thirty-mile mark when mama grizzly bears had trumped my intended campsites. My muscles cramped, my head throbbed, and in spite of a tailwind, my lightweight carbon-fiber paddle felt like a two-by-four and the seas felt like grape jelly. I was completely, utterly spent, and there were simply no other options. I knew that night would be no different from the three previous ones: when I was finally tucked into the thin veneer of my nylon tent, my serial date with the high tide would come knocking at my door. When saltwater began licking at my rainfly under the dark cloak of night I would curse the moon and I would curse gravity for conspiring on a 23-foot tidal exchange. Around three a.m. I would be forced to change back into my cold, wet rain gear and extract myself from my womblike shelter. Then, like a bride snatching up her gown, I’d lift my tent just as the water poured in around my bug-bitten ankles and stand tippy-toed on a piece of driftwood or slippery boulder. Each of those three past nights I stood in a brine-soaked kiddie pool, in the dark, in the pouring rain, and pleaded with the ocean, politely asking her, Are ya done yet?

I learned early on in my trip that Mother Nature can be unforgiving. Or she can be neutral, soothing you, enveloping you in her sweet velvety senses. But on that day in Grenville Channel—as I desperately tried to set up camp—she was schizophrenic. She didn’t care that I was on the verge of tears, or scared out of my wits. I’d put myself in this position, and it was up to me to put on my big girl panties and figure a way out.

It was then, when I was chilled to the bone, fumbling with the tarp, that an inner pathos hurtled out of me, along with an alarming variety of expletives. My explosive rage made my blood flow hot, pressed my mental reset button, and refocused my intent. Perhaps it saved my life. Miraculously, I was able to tend to all my needs: shelter, food, warmth and rest—at least for a few hours. Praying for sleep to come, shivering inside my slightly damp sleeping bag, eyes wide open, I felt an unease in the pit of my stomach. Would I have the strength and courage to take care of myself throughout the entire journey?

A Sea of Uncertainty

WATER WAS TABOO in my family: a strong river current had snatched my father’s five-year-old niece, who had slipped and fallen down a muddy bank while playing along its shores. The river took her and would not let go. My father vowed to never let me suffer from the same demise and forbade me to play in or near water during my youth.

I thought about this as I lay trembling in my tent that night in Grenville Channel and wondered if I should have heeded my father’s fears more seriously. But I knew better. Water is my element, where I feel most at home. I have always been attracted to water, seduced by it, drawn to the very thing that my parents tried to shield me from. I was nine years old when I learned that the letters W-A-T-E-R formed Helen Keller’s first spoken word. This impacted me in a way I couldn’t understand at the time, but now I realize that much like those five letters meant to Helen the wonderful cool something that was flowing over her hand—a living word that awakened her spirit and set it free—so water became for me a substance to love and cherish.

My spellbinding connection to water began with the forbidden tributaries and ponds I frequented as a young girl. I spent countless idle afternoons carefully positioning a toy boat high in the creek below our house—out of my parents’ view. The boat tumbled its way downstream, crashing into obstacles, careening over miniature waterfalls, bouncing and free flowing, much like my child’s mind. I’d run alongside it, enamored by the forces acting on it. This creek flowed into a small pond where I stashed a dilapidated rubber raft inside a rotten maple log. On quiet summer afternoons I would stealthily retrieve my raft and with my small pink lips sealed over the plastic valve, my pint-sized lungs would exhale air over and over again until the raft slowly began to take shape. Still dizzy from hyperventilating, I would climb in and shove off with my yellow plastic paddle. I’d often stop halfway across the pond, sling one leg over the side of the raft, and, with fishing pole in hand, gaze at the dark watery world below. I’d drift and dream at this most magical time when I truly knew how to relax.

KEEP YOUR LEGS WIDE, said my friend Bobbie. And sit tall like your mama told you to at the dinner table. Instinctively I pulled my chin back, my shoulder blades together, and lengthened my spine as my legs assumed a loose frog-legged position in the boat. It was early summer 1991 and was the first time my pelvis had met the low-slung fiberglass seat of a long, tippy sea kayak. As my toes reached for the foot pegs deep within the cockpit, I knew this was for me.

Don’t forget to breathe! Bobbie said as she watched the skinny kayak beneath my rigid hips respond to every twitch of muscle, and quiver a jig in dead calm waters.

My inaugural sea kayak excursion placed me on the largest lake west of the Mississippi. Bobbie was shepherding three greenhorn paddlers over the glassy waters of Montana’s Flathead Lake, across a three-mile freshwater expanse to a large island where we planned to have a picnic lunch and catch glimpses of wild horses and bighorn sheep grazing on the rolling hillsides.

Within ten minutes, my body started to relax and my hands loosened their grip on the paddle shaft. Soon my hips settled deeper in the cockpit and the boat sat quiet and steady beneath me. Hah! I yelled across the water toward Bobbie. She senses my fears—just like a horse. I stop fighting, she stops bucking! From this low, yet commanding vantage point, I treasured the feeling of cruising along on the water’s surface at the pace of a brisk walk. I felt blessed to experience nature’s beauty from this perspective, while absorbing all that my senses would allow. I was contained in that kayak, ensconced in a vessel that I literally wore, that suited my body type, my personality, my soul. I radiated a child-like sense of joy and wonder, and embraced a sense of discovery, contentment, and familiarity like none other. I transcended into a secret world, a magical world, a healing world with that first sea kayak experience. I could touch the water at will—and the water could touch me. The kayak was an extension of my hips, the paddle an extension of my torso. I imagined myself as half-woman, half-kayak. I was Womyak.

FOR THE NEXT NINETEEN YEARS, my perpetual love of water and this newfound sport led me to many adventures. Being on the water, paring life down to the basics, puts things in perspective for me and illuminates in a very clear and undiluted form what really matters—and who I am. I’d sometimes pack my gear into my kayak and disappear for several days to be alone somewhere on the water. I paddled the glacier-carved lakes of Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming. I paddled with friends in Mexico, Belize, on the Atlantic and the Pacific. I explored the Great Lakes and big rivers, from the muddy Missouri to the class-five whitewater rivers in Montana and Idaho. I paddled lagoons, estuaries, lakes, mill ponds, creeks, rivers, bays, and pools. Laudably, kayaking is a layered sport—it can be whatever you want it to be: gunk holing in protected nooks and crannies; playing in dynamic water; surfing; racing; pushing through grueling, exposed crossings; barreling down adrenalin-spiked whitewater; exploring sheltered coastlines—or paddling the Inside Passage.

My fascination with the Inside Passage began in 1996 when I joined Jim on a hundred-mile portion of its route in British Columbia. A novice at expedition paddling at the time, I stuck to Jim like the epoxy resin that held my kayak together, mimicking his every move, absorbing his seamanship skills as best I could, and simply learning about the unstable environment of the sea. I took an instant liking to the expedition aspect of sea kayaking. I loved the repetitive cycle of multi-day paddling: setting up camp, exploring, breaking camp, paddling, then more exploring. I reveled in my newfound self-containment—everything I needed to survive was either on my person or in my boat. I remembered falling into a rhythm with the ocean and feeling at peace with my surroundings. Over the years I was slowly introduced to other sections of the Inside Passage, and I felt a deep desire to connect the dots.

FROM A CRESCENT-SHAPED BEACH near Anacortes, Washington, I sat tall in the cockpit of my eighteen-foot sea kayak, ceremoniously dipped my paddle into the vast expanse of the Salish Sea, and sallied forth on an inner and outer journey up the Inside Passage of British Columbia and southeast Alaska, and into the unknown. It was Spring 2010.

My kayak was a beautiful boat: fire-engine red, low-slung and sleek, seaworthy, and tough as nails. Long and lean, she cut through the water gracefully, even fully loaded with kit, food, water, and paddler. She needed a name. I chose Chamellia.

Loosely named after the chameleon lizard, whose eyes rotate independently in all directions, I entrusted Chamellia’s 360-degree view of all aspects of this journey to watch over me and to help me adapt to quickly changing conditions. When my eyes were focused dead ahead, I’d need her to gently guide me, because part of my quest was to lose that tunnel vision, but not necessarily my focus. With our collective vision, one eye would be looking forward scanning the horizon, the other observing behind or to the side, to keep me—a mere sliver on the sea—safe. Whether we were facing long stretches of monotonous placid seas, or monstrous waves, or butt-puckering tidal currents, Chamellia and I would continuously respond and adjust to the ocean’s moods and motions, its rhythms and writhing. Slow and calculating, frozen in anticipation, or gracefully swift, we would meet the sea on its terms—or so I hoped.

I wanted nothing more than to experience the Inside Passage in all her moods, with all my senses. I wanted to feel free, bold, and spontaneous, to be awestruck, and to see in my journey the lessons I needed to learn. And I believed those lessons, and the ability to ponder deeper truths, would best be acquired in solitude. I realized my choice to go solo was risky, but I felt the potential rewards outweighed the possible dangers and accepted the fact that my adventure had an unknown outcome. For that is the ultimate draw of a long journey: the unknown, and all the possibilities of adventure wrapped up in that uncertainty.

Adventure implies an element of risk, of gambles and unpredictable circumstances, and one risk I was not willing to take was that of staying on shore and then dealing with the rising flood of what-ifs that would certainly follow. I didn’t want to grow old and look back on my life and feel disappointed that life had passed me by, or that I’d shortchanged myself and missed out on something big because I’d harbored fears of uncertainty. I didn’t see my adventure as a foolhardy endeavor or some sort of quixotic dream. It just felt right. The time was right, my dreams and ambitions about it were all right, as though my queries to the universe had finally given me the thumbs up. I needed to trust that all I’d done to this point had prepared me for this journey.

A Sense of Adventure

I DOVE HEAD-FIRST into the world while a blizzard raged outside a hospital window in upstate New York. It was January 14, 1961. As that storm raged on that cold winter evening, my birth mother—a child herself at sixteen—lay stupefied at the thought of a second mouth to feed. Her son, born eleven months earlier, was home with an uncle. Our father, who didn’t care much for snot-nosed kids, was nowhere to be found. He cared most for his bottle I was told—so much in fact that he had earned the title of town drunk. My birth mother would bear four of his children before she finally left him for good. Often neglected during those precious formative years, my three siblings and I were wrenched from the arms of our petrified teenaged mother and made wards of the court, consigned to New York State’s foster care system. I was three years old.

Meanwhile, in a neighboring county, Helen and William Conrad were busy